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Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be
sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not attempt. He is,
Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all
things; or rather He is within, at the innermost depth; the
outer, circling round Him, so to speak, and wholly dependent upon
Him, is Reason-Principle and Intellectual-Principle-or becomes
Intellectual-Principle by contact with Him and in the degree of
that contact and dependence; for from Him it takes the being
which makes it Intellectual-Principle.
A circle related in its path to a centre must be admitted to owe
its scope to that centre: it has something of the nature of that
centre in that the radial lines converging on that one central
point assimilate their impinging ends to that point of
convergence and of departure, the dominant of radii and
terminals: the terminals are of one nature with the centre,
separate reproductions of it, since the centre is, in a certain
sense, the total of terminals and radii impinging at every point
upon it; these lines reveal the centre; they are the development
of that undeveloped.
In the same way we are to take Intellectual-Principle and Being.
This combined power springs from the Supreme, an outflow and as
it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that
Intellective nature, showing forth That which, in the purity of
its oneness, is not Intellectual-Principle since it is no
duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or
circumference to be identified with that Centre which is the
source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by
indwelling power and, as products of a certain vigour in it, not
cut off from it.
Thus the Intellective power circles in its multiple unity around
the Supreme which stands to it as archetype to image; the image
in its movement round about its prior has produced the
multiplicity by which it is constituted Intellectual-Principle:
that prior has no movement; it generates Intellectual-Principle
by its sheer wealth.
Such a power, author of Intellectual-Principle, author of being-
how does it lend itself to chance, to hazard, to any "So it
happened"?
What is present in Intellectual-Principle is present, though in a
far transcendent mode, in the One: so in a light diffused afar
from one light shining within itself, the diffused is vestige,
the source is the true light; but Intellectual-Principle, the
diffused and image light, is not different in kind from its
prior; and it is not a thing of chance but at every point is
reason and cause.
The Supreme is cause of the cause: it is cause preeminently,
cause as containing cause in the deepest and truest mode; for in
it lie the Intellective causes which are to be unfolded from it,
author as it is not of the chance- made but of what the divine
willed: and this willing was not apart from reason, was not in
the realm of hazard and of what happened to present itself.
Thus Plato, seeking the best account of the necessary and
appropriate, says they are far removed from hazard and that what
exists is what must exist: if thus the existence is as it must be
it does not exist without reason: if its manner of being is the
fitting, it is the utterly self-disposing in comparison with its
sequents and, before that, in regard to itself: thus it is not
"as it happened to be" but as it willed to be: all this, on the
assumption that God wills what should be and that it is
impossible to separate right from realization and that this
Necessary is not to God an outside thing but is, itself, His
first Activity manifesting outwardly in the exactly
representative form. Thus we must speak of God since we cannot
tell Him as we would.
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